I. Field of the Invention.
The present invention relates generally to the field of sewing machines and, more particularly, to a ruffling device that is particularly adapted to construct ruffles on dry goods such as curtains, dust ruffles, pillow shams, comforters and bedspreads.
II. Description of the Prior Art.
It is well known in the sewing art that ruffling machines are available to effect ruffling upon various dry goods. However, the prior art is plagued with ruffling devices which perform extremely inconsistent ruffling, wherein the ruffles are poorly spaced apart or are performed with one enough ruffle or too much ruffle. The result of prior art ruffling devices has been to manufacture ruffles on dry goods which are not particularly pleasing to the eye.
The typical art ruffler is, like the present invention, attached to a standard type sewing machine and operates in conjunction with the machine. The ruffler arm and blade assembly which gathers the material into the ruffle, is controlled generally by a spring which biases the ruffler pusher blade downwardly so that the blade is always in contact with the material to be ruffled. At high speeds the biasing spring cannot recover fast enough to disengage the ruffler pusher blade from the material to be ruffled to begin the next ruffling stroke. Therefore, when the ruffler blade retracts on the backstroke it invariably drags along the material to be ruffled thereby undoing the ruffle and giving an inconsistent appearance. At other times, the ruffler blade, because of the spring biasing, will push too much material into the sewing machine presser foot thereby giving a different type of inconsistent ruffle, one which shows too much gathering.
Due to the inability of a spring biased ruffler blade to recover on the ruffling stroke, the prior art machines have been limited in the speeds which they achieve during the ruffling process. The typical standard speed of the prior art machines are in the range of 2,500 to 3,000 ruffles per minute.